Wednesday, May 28, 2008

some pics of the third floor kitchen in various stages of completion. last night beth and cindy painted two walls of it an orange (terra-cotta?) color, to give the apartment a little separation and add some color. they also painted new drywall and old walls white in the rest of the apartment.

currently working on setting cabinets and installing butcher block counter tops.

we're supplementing the cabinets that were in the third floor apartment with a few more, to make an L shaped counter top that we can sit at. this is us, screwing an ikea shelf back together after taking it apart and cutting four inches off of it to make it fit under the counter top.

here's the chimney project in the third floor apartment. we took the plaster off and repointed the brick. this is jake and annie carefully filling the cracks with dyed mortar. and me, fixing a hole that was a stove pipe and mortaring too.

props go out to austin; no pics of him, but he painted a bunch of trim and helped us carry heavy ikea stuff in from the car.

the fireplace area of the chimney has to rebuilt, you can see in the pics. i'm hoping to build an arched opening, but have to put that off until i have time to focus on it. too much other stuff to do at the moment.

memorial day weekend, a bunch of friends stopped over and helped us work. i only have pics of two of them, chelsea and sylvia. anthony, and leigh anna did a bunch of work too.

i've said it before, but i'll say it again: this house project has really made all of us feel grateful and amazed at the outpouring of support and friendship from our community. it makes this place feel like so much more than just a house.

beth is one of a kind, and she's spending a week with us, helping us work on the place. we heart her. she's helped out so much on our house that we will be forever in her debt. no amount of indigo girls and Rent viewings can ever really pay back all of her hard work...

here's some pics showing part of the process of refinishing the floor in the third floor apartment. i will remember this project as the one that almost broke me; i WAY underestimated how much work this floor needed. it was in pretty bad shape and needed a lot of boards replaced and a million small nails pulled. we worked a long time on this floor before we were able to stain and polyurethane it. now, it's looking really nice. we immediately covered it with paper and started working on other projects, so no pics of the finished product yet.

some pics that we posted on craigslist of the duplex apartment. it's looking really good, and we're hoping to have a renter soon to make it their home. this weekend, we move out of this space and into our own apartments!

when humans congregate in communal settings, many tasks our shared. here the female humans pick paint out of each other's hair. paint thinner and olive oil are applied, and the female human uses her fingernails to scrape and pull the paint off the hair follicle.

i'm waayyy behind in posting pictures, so i'm backing up and starting a few weeks ago. we're working on the third floor apartment this month. refinishing the floor, hanging drywall, rebuilding the kitchen, and building a wee bedroom for cindy and i. it will house an ikea wardrobe, a murphy bed, and a few inches of space around the bed. more like a sleeping chamber than bedroom, but it's the best we could come up with. the main idea is that one person (cindy) can sleep with the doors shut if the other person (dan) is up late playing recording music or watching movies.

we're loving the french doors. lots of light, and most of the time we'll leave them open for the extra space.

Monday, May 12, 2008

no pics at the moment, but:now that our third floor tenant has moved out, we are really going at the work on the third floor. exhausting is a word that comes to mind. the reason we're in such a rush, is that our goal is to move in there (dan and cindy) by the end of this month. and there's a lot to do before it's in good enough shape to be lived in. once we move in, and thabo and melissa move in to the fourth floor, we hope to find a renter, and have the duplex rented out june 1. because mortgage payments don't make themselves, you know...

this past weekend we continued floor work, among other projects. in order to make a usable floor, we stole floorboards from the 1st floor hallway (which will eventually get tiled or linoleumed or something). we took out bad (cracking, cut-up) boards and replaced them with ones from the hallway that were in better shape. we also took the opportunity to blow in insulation into the floor, with the hopes that it will help with sound deadening. the plan is to forge ahead this week, and refinish the floor, so that we can stain/poly it before the weekend (so we can continue on other projects).

the fireplace that we exposed last week is looking better and better; cindy and melissa have chiseled out the old mortar between the bricks and cleaned out loose bricks. it's now ready to be cleaned, have the loose bricks reset and remortar the whole thing. this may or may not happen in may. maybe. mayhap.

Monday, May 5, 2008

this was covering an old hole in the floor, that at one time was a bathroom/toilet fixture. it was a pad of concrete, that had chunks of the old fireplace mantel in it, as well as some other tiles. it was serving as an extremely heavy and solid closet floor until we pulled it up and busted it into chunks. that's jad proudly displaying the weird chunk of concrete and tile.

we pulled up old layers of vinyl and linoleum to get down to the pine flooring. there were at least 5-6 different layers of flooring, and at the bottom of it all was a layer of newspaper from 1951. really interesting to stop and read about what was going on the year they put that floor down. lots of people still worried about the Reds (not the baseball team). and a surprising number of women in bathing suits...

behind melissa is the fireplace that we uncovered. it seems to be in fairly decent shape; better than the one we redid in the duplex apartment.

underneath a layer of fairly new drywall in the kitchen of the third floor, we could see tin ceiling. we really like tin ceiling, but we were worried it would be in bad shape if we tore the drywall down. after some deliberation, we decided to take the plunge, and were pleasantly surprised; it's in really good shape. at least good enough that we can make it look nice.

the metal pieces are what held the drywall up to the ceiling. all of that came off very easily.

okay, after a week or so of relative down time for the four of us, we have jumped back in. the third floor tenant has moved out as planned, and on saturday we started work up there. that's where cindy and i will live, and the work we are doing to the apartment feels a little more exciting for us, because it's stuff we want to do to make it our home. so, we tore out two closets to open up the apartment and give it more floor space, pulled the plaster off a fireplace to expose the brick, and pulled up flooring. our friends annie, jad, leigh anna, and tracy all came over to help us, which was SO NICE OF THEM! thank you friends, for being friends, and for helping us. with all of those people helping, we formed some pretty effective trash lines out the back window and down the fire escape to add trash to the giant trash pile. saturday was an amazing and productive day. and very dirty.